Pre-Architectures

nvision a world without architecture, a world-tecture without arche, the latter meaning not only beginning or origin but also the authority to arrange and subordinate persons, objects, and processes into an identifiable power structure. Pre-architecture is not simply “not architecture”—it is what architecture could have become but ultimately disavowed. The same unfulfilled potentialities haunt not only the distant past but also architecture’s anxious present in a time of environmental crisis, energetic transformation, and related social challenges. The publication, which accompanies the exhibition of the same name in Brussels, refers to the beginnings of human habitat and features a transdisciplinary field of architects, artists, sociologists, and archaeologists. Speculating on the “birth” of design, it questions the cultural, social, economic, and political foundations of spatial organization.